


[redacted]

by AngelicSentinel



Category: Magic Kaito, 名探偵コナン | Detective Conan | Case Closed
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:35:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26499493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngelicSentinel/pseuds/AngelicSentinel
Summary: '...so it’s summer, so it’s suicide,so we’re helpless in sleep and struggling at the bottom of the pool.'Siken, "Little Beast,"Crush
Comments: 14
Kudos: 24





	[redacted]

**Author's Note:**

> '...so it’s summer, so it’s suicide,  
> so we’re helpless in sleep and struggling at the bottom of the pool.'
> 
> Siken, "Little Beast," _Crush_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was written in postmodern style, which to spare you university courses, boils down to truth is relative and structure is bullshit. The hovertext notes focus on authorial intent but don’t represent one true reading. Feel free to interpret it however you like.
> 
> This has no summary or metatags. If I could get by without a title, it wouldn’t have that. This is deliberate metatextual commentary on Kaito’s inability to speak about his trauma. Mobile friendly notes can be found [here](https://angelicsentinel.dreamwidth.org/30842.html)

Kaito freezes in the door of the classroom. Aoko's talking to that bastard, who's gesticulating wildly. Kaito's riveted to the spot.

It's his hands.1 Ha—Saguru has long wide fingers. The same. His face, too. Not his eyes, but his wide nose. The pitch and timbre of his voice. The strange way he accents certain syllables, almost foreign but not quite. 

Kaito looks away. 

He grins, bright and blinding. And saunters into class. 

The teacher drones on. 

The heat is unbearable, and even the summer uniform is a little too much, shirt plastered to his front as sweat pours down his back. 

Those hands. Saguru has his hands. 

He’d never noticed those hands before. Now he can't watch anything else.

He looks away again. 

-e ----e- -e—--e- -e ----?2

Cicadas chirrup in the distance. 

-

In Kaito’s dream, he’s walking through a dry lake bed. Dangerously parched, his throat sticks together and he cannot speak. 

The mud cakes his feet. Covers him to his knees. Each step is heavier than the one before it. He walks away from the dirtied water at the center, knowing it will kill him should he drink it.

The bed itself is filled with rotting **_fish_** , death and decay overwhelming and Kaito averts his eyes. 

Kaito trips and falls, arm outstretched towards the sharp incline leading out of the lake. He’s so close. He sinks into the mud, opens his mouth for one last desperate gasp, and mud pours in. 

A hand on his shoulder, a low murmuring voice, and Kaito surges up. His eyes blur, the fluorescent light above blinding, and someone’s restraining him. A hospital? A sharp throb on his wrist and the base of his spine, and he struggles, lashing out before being forced down again. He fights, but the hands holding him down are too strong. 

And so the needle goes round and round and round his lips, piercing his face in neat little rows and sewing his mouth shut.

-

Kaito jerks awake with a gasp, clutching at his mouth as that very same hand shakes him. 

_Brr-eeep_ , _brr-eeep_ ,3 the cicadas sing, a loud, droning bell-like chorus.

“Geez, Kaito, don’t sleep in class!” Aoko scolds. 

“Kuroba—” that very same voice says. 

“Don’t touch me!” Kaito pleads, and the whole class turns and stares and stares and stares. 

He anchors himself with Akako’s gaze, her face grim. He wonders if she knows. He wonders what she sees.

Kaito grins, shards of glass in his teeth. An explosion of light and sound and confetti decorates the class. Saguru’s hair is green. His eyes are wide in surprise. It’s a better look. 

Everyone laughs, and the moment is forgotten. 

_Don’t look away._

-

Unreal city.4

Brr-eep. Brr-eep. 

Damp hot heat of Tokyo summer, hotter now on the walk home, heat radiating up from the pavement in shimmering auras, blurring the lines so nothing seems distinct. 

Aoko says, _brr-eep_ , _brr-eep_ , droning on and on. 

It’s night, and he’s lying in bed staring at the ceiling. In his hands is a purple rubber ball with a thin black four surrounded by a little white circle.5 He throws it and it bounces. Once on the floor. Once on the wall. Once on the ceiling. Tha-thunk thunk. Tha-thunk thunk.

The moon rises.

Tha-thunk thunk. Tha-thunk thunk.

Tha-thunk thunk, and into the dawn, sun casting the sky in shades of blood. 

-

In Kaito’s dream, he’s running. He's not sure from what. Down a double yellow lined road with a thick copse of aspens6 on either side. No moon, and clouds obscure the stars.

Something's after him and his legs won't move.

He pushes himself on and on. 

Whatever it is is getting closer and closer. Moving forward, inexorable. It's so close now—

He's in a field of wheat, hip high. The brutal sun shines down on him from a cloudless sky.

Hair stands up on the back of his neck. Someone's watching him. He can't tell from where.

The house with the dark, dark windows in the middle of the wheat field offers solace. But the sensation grows the closer he gets to the house. Soulless. Something's after him and it's hungry. Kaito steps on the portico and the door yawns wide—

-

"Kaito?" his mother asks, her pixelated face concerned. "You alright?"

Kaito cracks a smile. It shatters his face. "I'm fine, Mom."

_Don't look._

"Are you sure? Because I can come back—"

"No!" Kaito begs. "No," he repeats, much more quietly, no matter how desperately he wants her to come.

She can't. 

He knows.

Little boys with dead fathers and absent mothers don't get choices. Kaito learned this a long time ago. 

_Don't look._ 7

"If you're sure—"

"I'm sure."

Kaito isn't sure of anything.

How many times? How many days?

One?

Ten?

A hundred?

A thousand?

Who knows?

Not Kaito, hollow Kaito, with black void eyes and white bleached bones.

He only knows hands and heat and stars.

_Don't look away._

-

Another sweltering day.

Kaito walks, this time alone.

He looks up at the sky, hears a roar, a sharp cacophonous whistle.

Bombs over Tokyo, a never ending nightmare of fire.8

The world has ended and this is hell.

_You brought this on yourself._

The fire consumes everything; water can't stop it, only make it spike higher. The river boils. The ocean boils. He can't breathe.

The fire sticks. It clings to his skin. It won't come off.

No matter how much Kaito scrubs, **it won't come off.**

The world burns.

Charcoal bodies stacked like logs.

Kaito is dry and hollow.

He skips rocks down the aqueduct as a mushroom cloud rises in the distance.

White feather rain.9

-

"Kuroba," a voice says, and it's softer. Hesitant. Different.

Kaito watches, wary. Focuses on his eyes. The different shape. The different color. Warmer. Doesn't say anything. Only watches.

"Kuroba," Saguru says again, entreating.

Kaito says nothing. He opens his mouth and the spiders10 pour out with scrabbling legs and sharp sharp pincers. They cover the desk, the floor, hundreds of thousands of them.

They cover his face, gnawing at it, and he wonders—no, it’s better not to think on it at all. 

(no matter how often it plays out in his mind or in his dreams)

One bites off his tongue and tears into it, chittering. 

Chitinous.11

Kaito. 

_Don’t look away._

Kaito speaks with a mouth that has no voice.

Saguru watches with eyes that do not see. 

-

Suzuki Jirokichi crows on and on _. Co co rico co co rico._ 12 Behind him stands Nakamori. 

Kaito changes the channel.

The school has a staircase Kaito’s never seen before. It spirals down, each step steep.

It ends in a long hallway, edged in doors. Either side has a deep chasm over the edge kept back by only a blood red rail. 

The doors open and close and shut on their own. Kaito ignores them all, placing each step carefully, one foot in front of the other. 

He slips, only just catching himself. 

The railing is wet. 

Forever is a promise.

Kaito walks forever.

-

“It’s so weird,” Aoko says, hand on her chin. “I’ve never seen Kid act that way before. He was...violent.”

“That’s because it wasn’t Kid,” Saguru says quietly.13

How cold the sky looks from here, endless untouchable blue. Kaito wants to wrap himself up in it. 

“They arrested him, thanks to the Kid Killer,” Akako says.

“He knows it’s not Kid, either. The real Kid, I mean.” Saguru says. He cuts his eyes at Kaito. Kaito bleeds.

“If that wasn’t Kid, then where was the real one?” Aoko asks.

The hum of planes. The whistle of fire. 

“I wonder,” Saguru says, his voice weighed with the mountains and graveled with their age.

-

Before him is a river.14 It runs through a crowd. Kaito runs, instinctively seeking something but not knowing what. He’s bleeding. 

A slash upon his throat, gurgling blood. A knife through his heart. His nails are peeled back from his fingers, and they pour. Glass eats through his feet, so he falls to his knees. 

“Please,” he begs, still crawling, still fighting. “Anyone, anyone.”

They all turn. 

_Don’t look._

_Don’t look._

_Don’t look away._

“Please,” he says, his voice glass thread. 

One person turns back, and Kaito feels hope for just a moment before a foot is brought down upon his skull.

-

Kaito does not break his word. But tonight, again. His word breaks him. 

Kaito doesn’t know if he can take much more of this.

He makes himself small on the bed and spreads his thighs, looks out the window and thinks of stars instead, how they were forged in the cosmic fires of the beginning of the universe.

How he'd like to be a star, distant and burning and fierce. He wraps his white hot cloak of flame around himself and endures.

Endures because he doesn't know how to do anything else.

Somewhere, the nightingale sings his sorrowful lament. _Tee-ree-uss. Tee-ree-uss._ 15

Somewhere, Tithonus spreads his wings from his shriveled corpse and cries, _brr-eep, brr-eep_ to the Dawn.16

-

He wanders through empty building after empty building, the doors closed, with paint and plywood and into a grand shopping center. Empty store after empty store, mannequins thick with dust. 

Though he’s watching, he doesn’t notice when Aoko disappears. Only notices when his hunger drives him to the restaurant on the fourth floor and she’s not beside him anymore. 

The smell of meat has him salivating, and the cheap suited man with no face gives him a thick sandwich. 

Kaito bites into it ravenously, hot juices flowing down his face. The taste is off. It’s not pork. Not quite. 

He turns, and only then does he see the blood–soaked sailor uniform, carelessly discarded in the filthy puddle next to the wall.17

-

Left alone. Kaito stumbles out, half aware, lost in this maze. 

Thinks about it long and hard enough he feels words appear on his skin. _Unclean_. They're red and bleeding, cut deep.

He thinks he breaks a vase.18

One more step. Always one more.

He finds a bed and collapses, uncaring anymore if it kills him. 

Living's overrated anyway.

The heat sears. He sees his bones in stark relief as his eyes burn from his skull.19

The bed is cold and the sheets are smooth and soft.

He’s so tired. 

He drifts.

-

The storm is brewing rapidly, shifting and changing as Kaito watches. A flash of lightning, and a figure appears in the street, hooded and staring. Kaito takes a step back. Lightning flashes again and the figure is closer now, staring up at him from below.

Another flash and the figure is closer.

Kaito scrambles backwards, hiding under the covers of his bed.

But there's a mirror, and he can still see them, and he watches, no matter how much he wants to look away.

It's raining hard.

Flash.

Closer.

Flash. 

Closer.

The sound of thunder and a nothing hood face pressed against the glass before passing through—20

-

He wakes.

Movement has him jolt up, but it hurts too much and so he falls to the bed, defeated. 

"What are you doing in my room?" Kaito says, confused.

"You're in mine." Saguru. A familiar hand descending towards his face. 

Kaito flinches away, and Saguru curls his hand into a red-white fist. His face is hot, his eyes are wet. “Tell me it’s not true,” he begs.21

Saguru cannot say it.

That’s fine. Kaito can’t say it either. Daren’t speak of it. Daren’t even think.

It’s the truth that no one speaks of, the one hidden in dark corners, from tenements to palace gardens, a silent scream buried in throats that must never breach air. 

Silence is its own type of violence, and it kills.

Kaito expects denial. Instead, those soft eyes harden. Kaito looks away. 

“I didn’t know,” Saguru says, his voice low. “I swear.” 

He’s crying. It's so wrong to see him cry.

“I’m going to kill him," he says, and Kaito has never heard his voice sound so ugly.

He reaches up towards a halo of blond hair.

He fades.22


End file.
